Opinion: Nissan’s Cars from the Future

Business World columnist Holman Jenkins on Nissan’s plans to roll out self-driving cars by 2020. Photo credit: Nissan.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

... Nissan just get all the wonderful announcement this week that it's going to hope to be producing and selling driverless cars by the year twenty twenty ... meeting cars that are essentially driven by a computer ... well guess who may be camped out from one of those Nissan dealers trying to buy one of those cars ... none other than our own hell Holman Jenkins who for years has championed driverless Cars pilot was planes ... and even trains without engineer ... who has your ship so to speak of him home and I ... haven't come up with the captain the ship yet but the ... you know the reason ITC technology coming in and taking over these functions anyway in reducing the driver the pilot that ... the engineer to basically a bystander and someone who in a panic some the does something wrong in causes that ... so part of my preapproved perception is that if you have this much stick on him I will go the whole way because it has only been in a few more changes to the mishap fertile petri ... this clueless driver and a car that has a mind of it's up ... there a lot of promise with this though I admit ... the Johnson such as ... you know ... would you sue when there's an accident to who's at fault when somebody gets run over by a driverless car that is in a program not to run you over the course of in something you did then ... and you know ... where you're going to have this long transition period with rivals cars and cars with drivers ... here that that the driver in a see that car you know that whatever it's been happens it cannot cause an ax and Syngenta cutoff iteration for parking ... space or in a play chicken with it because people always do that either way well this raises for the most interesting aspects of all this I mean most people would probably say I can't believe there's gonna be a car ... that has no Crutcher whatsoever ... but the Nissan executives themselves said the technology is not the biggest problem here the problems are gonna be regulatory kind of along the lines you were to suggest that or liability is also things like ... we have this the tradition of the speed limits in this country ... there are speed limits and no one pays attention to what happens when suddenly twenty five or thirty percent the cars ... are religiously obeying the speed limits while the rest of us are trying to kill our normal speeds ... you know that we have this were a lot of things happen for really make sense to mix these cars with the normal thriving population ... what what what you do ... with the technology will talk little bit about the technology the kinds of technologies that already exist that awful while this sort of thing to ... be conceivable prices there are no braking system to break before you even get to put on the break everything that makes the driverless car an interesting idea ... can be applied toward normal car now and step in and save you from an accident ... you know that ninety percent actions are are drier air losses are simply inattention people taking their eyes off the road for two or three seconds at a time it happened it's not just texting its drinking coffee is slapping the kids in the backseat ... Destino grooming the dog that whatever the this is the main cause of accidental in a lot of acid simply by ... putting in the car the ability to knock it ... are we literally got me talking about a car that doesn't have a driving wheel which people can be sitting talking to one another playing cards texting that's a little better where we're going a long way off you know I would expect that to my last time I think you're police cars will have someone sitting in the driver's position you'll never be really totally irresponsibility and think ok this doesn't make sense at least not until we get all the other drivers off the road ... what about the issue of the technology where a now if you're putting your faith completely in sensors cameras and so forth why not worried that something's gonna go Alt as technology and we will enable the highway that the it you'll still have access to serve all the taxes you will have technology failures ... it just couldn't be better than what you have announced a thirty thousand people dying on the roads your mental be five thousand ... and there'll be undoubtedly unit disasters in which technology will ... bear the full blind but still on average be a better world in the world we have now presumably an amateur suggesting that will ... sort of put in motion an entirely ... different ... kind of lawsuit ... liability responsibilities ... that all these on a manufacturing boom there is that the driver of the maker of the technology that person sold in the car somebody will have to sort that ... you know they come with a private plane Navy store the private plane industry about twenty five years ago but limiting liability ... for the manufacturers and suddenly ... feel all you know we use to be too perturbed flying fifty girls says this is you couldn't buy a new one so XTEX terrain was worse ... until we reduce liabilities them give it new planes into the market yet so in some ways that the